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Best Films of 2012

Another year, another list. While I am always discounting my lists as not being comprehensive of all the important movies that came out in a given year and also that they are comprised of movies from all times, not just the current year, I have to say that the Best of 2012 lists that I’ve been reading lately have been remarkably the same as one another, so maybe my Film Diary’s quirks are somewhat of an odd advantage. I dunno. You tell me.

In the theater, the highlight event was seeing director Abel Gance’s 1927 masterpiece Napoléon with a full orchestra at the beautiful Paramount Theater in Oakland, CA. At nearly six hours, it’s an epic of an epic beyond epic ambition and epic invention. No one other experience came close to this as the most profound trip to the cinema this year. Though it’s interesting that the last film that I saw in the theater this year was another epic, a beautiful digital restoration of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, during which Gance’s Napoléon frequently came to mind. An interesting contrast between Gance’s radical cinematic experimentation for his sprawling biography versus Lean’s cleanly codified and polished masterpiece.

For new films in the theater, most of the year my answer for best film would have been a tad begrudgingly Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) prequel, Prometheus. That was, until I saw Django Unchained from Quentin Tarantino. Controversial perhaps on a number of levels, I think that this is probably Tarantino’s most inspired film. Time will tell, of course. It’s still fresh in my mind. But I came out of it really thinking “Wow.”

I know some friends who will think that I’ve really lost it with those recommendations, but, you know, I really enjoyed those two films.

At the home cinema, there were fewer surprises and discoveries. More visits to old favorites and re-visiting things with the kids.

On the discovery front, Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls (1932) is a terrific pre-code horror film. I can’t believe I’d never seen it before.